


life is a scavenger’s pit

by Typatia



Series: a menagerie of fluff fics [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ben Solo Lives, Devoted Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Force Bond (Star Wars), Indiana Jones References, Inspired by The Gift of the Magi - O. Henry, POV Ben Solo, Post-Canon, Rey is Not a Palpatine (Star Wars), TROS does not exist, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, brief mention of trying to have a baby but no pregnancy in the course of the fic, gratuitous mentions of droids and calligraphy, rey is lowkey a hoarder, slightly cracky at times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 15:51:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26530177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Typatia/pseuds/Typatia
Summary: While attempting to clean out the Millennium Falcon, Ben comes across a droid Rey’s been trying to repair for ages. Since their anniversary is approaching, Ben comes up with a brilliant plan to sell something of his own in order to pay for parts—but little does he know, Rey has had the same idea.Or: a reworked "The Gift of the Magi" story, in which our two idiots share a single brain cell.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: a menagerie of fluff fics [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1930414
Comments: 8
Kudos: 21





	life is a scavenger’s pit

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title comes from the poem "The Gift" by H.D. The planet of Feva is loosely inspired by Port Coriol in The Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers (I highly recommend giving that one a read!).
> 
> If you'd like to skip the section about babies, simply ignore the paragraph beginning "After two years of life together." It won't affect the story one way or another if you miss it.
> 
> Please enjoy.

Ben Solo liked to recall that his wife had many virtues.

It just so happened that organization was not one of them.

Cohabiting had taken a lot of adjustment at first. It had taken Ben ages to understand that the establishment of boundaries didn’t signal the absence of trust but rather its opposite. Take two Force-bonded individuals with heightened sensitivity and, like two glasses in an endless series of toasts, there’s bound to be some spillover into one another.

But they’d adapted. They’d learned the other’s proclivities. Rey had teased him lightly over his inability to cook and his hygienic fussiness—he’d never lived in a place without immediate and frequent access to a shower and so was, at first, horrified to find that his wife saw no need to bathe daily. In time, his fastidiousness over this had faded, and he’d found himself conceding to Rey that there was no point in wasting water. In regard to his culinary skills, Rey was apt to remark that he’d find a way to burn boiled water if possible, and she still didn’t trust him to so much as brew a pot of caf.

But Rey was not without her vices, and that was where the spare room came in.

And all the things that were _supposed_ to be in the spare room.

It was a grand paradox of life that Ben had grown up wealthy and yet seemed to have few possessions at all, while Rey had had nothing and now seemed to have everything. At first, it had started out small: piles of droid parts, cobbled-together machinery designed to keep the aging infrastructure of the Falcon together with luck and bits of wire, nesting materials for the Porgs… The mess proliferated, expanding from Rey’s work bench to the number three hold and threatening to overtake the ship altogether.

At some point, Ben had put his foot down and insisted she keep only what could be stored in the spare room, which had once been the crew quarters.

The trouble was, Rey’s possessions had a penchant for multiplying, as if they were engaged in some kind of junkular mitosis as yet undiscovered by scientists. Some of them had begun to march their way toward the walk-in closet, advancing onward as if they had grown legs. Add that to the confoundment of the Porgs, who took about copulating as if they were the last of their kind and had to repopulate the Falcon with their younglings, and the fact that Rey had a habit of picking up droids that followed her around like ducks imprinting on their mother, and the Falcon had become awfully _crowded_.

Ben had taken to calling the place a menagerie. He was only half-joking.

After two years of life together, they’d begun to discuss starting a family, but there was a distinct problem: it was getting difficult for _two_ people to live in the Falcon, let alone three. Ben was quite concerned that they’d have nowhere to put the baby if they had one.

Taking care of the Porgs had been a relatively simple matter: Ben had suggested they gift the offspring to Chewie and keep the elder pair for themselves, and Rey had had them spayed and neutered. Even this, it had to be said, marked a concession for Ben—he’d plopped down into their shared bunk at night one too many times and found that the Porgs had left behind a little gift of their own.

(Nowadays, he checked the sheets before climbing in.)

And then yesterday, Rey had promised to let him clean out the spare room so long as she retained veto power over whatever he chose to throw out.

Hence why he was now knees-deep in the scavenger’s pit. He’d worked himself into a steady rhythm, approaching a level of focus akin to meditation when he straightened up, tripped over the bottom half of a nonfunctional gonk droid, and almost impaled himself on something sharp.

It appeared to be a set of knives shaped like fingers.

Or perhaps they were fingers shaped like knives.

Yes, that had to be it. He recalled now. Over a year ago he and Rey had rescued a former assassin droid, repaired it, and sent it on its merry way to a new murder-less life (“He can’t help the way he’s programmed,” Rey had said sympathetically, and Ben had tried desperately not to identify with a killer droid).

“Rey?” he called now. “Is there any reason to keep these?” he asked, sending her a mental picture.

“I don’t know,” she yelled back. “They might come in…”

_… handy,_ she finished inside his head.

Ben rolled his eyes. _That pun was so bad you had to make it silently._

_What pun? I said no such thing,_ Rey’s inner voice was smug.

Ben sent back a trill of laughter through the bond before heading back to work. Several hours later and he’d cleared his way to the back of the room, feeling rather like an archaeologist uncovering civilization underneath layers of sediment. He was about to call it a day and begin gathering up his pile of things for the trash compactor when he noticed something he’d missed.

It was an old QT-9 therapy droid, a precursor to the BB series.

It was, in fact, the first thing Rey had set out to fix—and the first thing she’d failed to.

The failure hadn’t come from a lack of perseverance on her part; Ben thought with a pang of the determination on his wife’s face as she’d set about tinkering with it. However, even the best engineer could not conjure parts out of nowhere. The QT-9 was missing a photoreceptor and its internal gyroscopic propulsion system had been damaged. Over the years they’d met with several traders hoping to pick up the parts, but they were either damaged themselves or just beyond their budget range.

With a sinking heart, Ben recalled Rey picking the droid up off her work bench with the Force and transporting it to the spare room, as it was no longer capable of locomoting by itself. “You can’t throw something away just because it’s broken,” she’d said, and he was quite sure she wasn’t talking about the droid. “Someday it’ll be whole again.”

It had collected dust ever since.

***

Ben was silent throughout the evening meal, too tired and absorbed in his own thoughts to consider the irony that Rey had made happy-patties for dinner, which he was neither emotionally or physically prepared for.

He had to admit to himself that the QT-9 wasn’t the only thing gathering dust. He fixed his eyes on the shelf behind Rey’s head, where his calligraphy set stood in pride of place. He enjoyed using most of the pens—had even gifted Rey an ink drawing of the planet where they’d spent their honeymoon for their latest anniversary—but there was one that he never removed from its case.

It was a pen made of kyber crystal, thousands of years old, priceless beyond imagination.

It was also entirely useless.

The pen’s tip was too sharp for regular paper and required parchment made from the bark of a Force-sensitive uneti tree.

And even if that were possible to find, there was the matter that the only compatible ink was made of tiny glittering shards of kyber, which he’d gleaned only from one obscure mention in an equally abstruse Jedi text years ago. What Force-sensitive ink was capable of he didn’t know, but over the years he’d sent the Knights of Ren on multiple trips to far-flung planets in an attempt to collect any Force-related artifacts they could find. To his chagrin, they’d never returned with anything approaching the ink, nor had it turned up in all his sojourns with Luke and Lor San Tekka. The ink, he was forced to admit to himself, no longer existed.

When he’d first placed the calligraphy set on the shelf in the hold, Rey had joked that while her side of the ship might resemble a menagerie, his was a museum, full of old-fashioned things of indeterminate value.

And that was where his thoughts took off into hyperspace. Surely there was some sort of collector, or even a museum, that might be interested in such an artifact.

Someone that might be interested enough to finance parts for the QT-9 droid.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Rey through a mouthful of happy-patty.

“That’s never good,” Ben joked weakly.

“Ha ha,” she went on tonelessly. “What would you say to a stop at Feva? The Falcon needs a new compressor, and they’re bound to have it. Besides, I always wanted to see it.”

“Feva?” Ben echoed. Feva was a sort of planetwide marketplace, the type of place Han—no, Dad would have loved, but for one fact: the air was mildly toxic to humans. The native Garabandian species had designed a workaround for this in recent years, a sort of complex oxygen helmet that rendered the wearer as looking rather like their head was enclosed in a giant bubble. It wasn’t the most pleasant of modifications, and added to the fact that the planetary air was so dry and arid that it stripped your skin of moisture entirely within a few hours of landing, the perils of shopping there were more trouble than they were worth, especially when there were other places like Coruscant and Corellia capable of fulfilling the same needs.

Still though—what if someone in Feva had parts for a QT-9? Ben could distantly feel his mind making the jump.

“Sure,” he said, imagining himself with a bubble on his head. “I’d love to go to Feva.”

***

That morning, before Rey had awoken, Ben sneaked out into the hold and pulled the calligraphy set off the shelf.

He’d realized that the trouble with his previous anniversary gift was that it had been entirely self-indulgent; he’d enjoyed making it as much as he had enjoyed giving it. He wanted Rey to have something that was completely _hers_ this time around, like the gift she’d given him last year: a pair of fingerless leather gloves that he’d adored.

Then again, over the past year, they’d managed to put those leather gloves to some rather unorthodox uses, so perhaps they hadn’t been for his benefit only. And he had to admit the calligraphy set had seen its more prurient uses over the years. He recalled with fondness the time he’d lain Rey down on top of a star chart he’d just been inking in. (The image of Rey pulling herself up from the table after, her back covered in shining, inky-wet stars, was one that still entertained his lewder dreams.)

He was trying not to imagine an erotic use for the QT-9 droid when Rey walked in. If he’d been in better possession of his mental faculties, he might have noticed that there was something furtive in her manner.

“Do you mind if we split up for a while today?” she asked. “I’ve got a rendezvous with that smuggler about the compressor, but I have my suspicions that he hasn’t got the right model. He didn’t sound terribly confident. I bet he can’t tell a YT-1300 from a YT-1300f, and if that’s the case I’ll have to hunt down a trader on the surface before we can do any shopping together anyway.”

Once, the suggestion that they spend less time together might have sent Ben into a spiral of doom and fear that Rey didn’t love him anymore. Today, he was just grateful that he didn’t have to make the proposal himself.

Then again, his mouth might just interfere. “Are you sure? I could wait and meet him with you,” he said stupidly. _Shit._ His inborn need to attach himself to Rey’s hip was threatening to ruin his plans.

Rey’s eyes widened. “No! I mean, no, I can do it myself. Go explore on your own. I’ll meet you down there in a couple hours.” 

Ben nodded absently, now thoroughly convinced there was some game afoot, one he didn’t know the rules to, and in fact, he hadn’t even known they were playing a game. He frowned, suddenly hesitant to leave. “Alright, if you’re sure,” he said with a shrug, pausing to give her a peck on the forehead. “I’ll take one of the escape pods down to the air station.”

“I’ll see you soon,” Rey said, flashing a smile without a trace of concealment, and Ben felt bad about projecting his own desire for subterfuge onto his wife. _She deserves better than that,_ he thought. 

_No—she deserves the best._

***

An excursion to Feva could more properly be classified as an adventure rather than a shopping trip. The planet’s surface was dotted with numerous open-air markets, small, out-of-the-way shops, and thousands of districts devoted to the most niche of tastes. From the second Ben landed and placed the glass air helmet over his head, he could hear a cacophony of different languages resonating around him so loudly he could barely hear himself think.

Or perhaps that was just an unfortunate side effect of the glass dome.

The first thing he had to do as a bwwmwwff (a Garabandian word meaning something like “shopper-tourist”) was register with the Fevan government, who would appoint him with a tour guide to suit his shopping needs.

Tall and ranging from shades of brown to orange, Garabandians stood on two hoof-like feet, a pair of hyperpigmented reticulated trunks protruding from above their small mouths that put Ben in mind of the Falcon’s compressor coils. Given the miniscule size of their mouths, they were not capable of speaking Basic. Instead, they used voice boxes to communicate with their guests, while using their trunks to talk to one another.

Fifteen highly efficient minutes later and he was assigned a companion for the day.

“What is your name?” Ben asked politely. After leaving the First Order, he had come to understand that people understandably put high stock in what they called themselves.

“You cannot pronounce it,” the mechanized voice emanating from the Garabandian’s throat said.

“Okay,” said Ben. “Mine’s Ben.”

“I hate this place,” said the Garabandian. “It’s become too commercialized.” Ben was beginning to regret every aspect of this encounter.

“Right, well, I’m sure they told you I’m not interested in the commercial district. I need to sell this,” he said, brandishing the kyber pen, “and buy some parts for a QT-9 droid.”

The Garabandian considered. “QT-9 is easy. The other, not so much.” He paused, his trunks bouncing up and down in a rhythm that Ben supposed meant he was deep in thought. “Yes… there is a human here who collects many artifacts. He may be interested in what you have to offer.”

“A human?” Ben was intrigued. He couldn’t imagine voluntarily living in this place.

“A professor of archaeology,” the Garabandian clarified. “We will have to take transport G-12 to Sector 186 and then the F7 train to Sector 112, where the next transport doesn’t come until…”

“You can finish telling me on the way,” Ben said.

***

The professor of archaeology had been nice, if a bit eccentric. If he was to be believed, he’d once found a jungle full of kyber crystal skulls (“But I don’t do too much adventuring anymore, kid,” he’d confided to Ben, and Ben had been unable to shake the thought that something about this man seemed familiar.)

In the end, the kyber pen had fetched a handsome price—enough, Ben was certain, to buy five new QT-9 droids, had Rey wanted them.

With a lighter step, he headed to the droid repair market (which was different from the droid market, which was different from the droid sex toy market). He was even beginning to enjoy his companion’s routine sarcastic remarks.

He picked up the new photoreceptor and gyroscopic propulsion device from the friendly Garabandian behind the counter of the QT-9 shop and exited onto the busy street. Ben was just thinking about contacting Rey when he saw a pair of feminine shoulders moving quickly ahead of him. He would know the shape of that back anywhere, covered with inky stars or not.

“Rey!” he called, and she and her own Garabandian tour guide stopped short.

Rey’s eyes sparkled as if she hadn’t seen him in days rather than only hours and, unthinkingly, they both made to kiss each other.

Their glass helmets collided with a resounding _ding!_

“Oh no, I guess we’ll have to wait until the Falcon,” Rey said. Her voice sounded bizarrely muffled through the glass. “I was going to suggest we eat here, but… how do we do that exactly?” she asked, gesturing to her head.

“You can pick food up from any of the many stands,” her Garabandian companion said, “and take it back to the air station.”

Rey beamed. “I can’t wait to try Fevan cuisine. Yes, let’s do that.” She reached her hand out and wiggled her fingers at Ben, who took her hand gladly, even as he noticed she was clutching a shopping bag in her other arm.

_What’s in the bag?_ They spoke at the same time in their heads, internal voices overlapping one another as she peered down at his own free hand.

_Nothing,_ they both responded at the same time.

“Let’s go get that Fevan street food,” Ben said, figuring that when all else failed, a change of subject and a meal would do the trick.

***

Over the next few days leading up to their anniversary, Ben could hardly contain his excitement.

That was, until he realized belatedly that he’d given so much thought to the gift that he hadn’t considered what they were actually going to _do_ on the big day. He’d considered a picnic at Naboo, but they’d done that last year, and it was becoming a cliché anyway.

In the end, it was Rey who made the decision for them. “I think we should stay on the Falcon, just you and me. Fly into orbit somewhere and just glide… We’re always working, or flitting off somewhere—I just want to be _here_ , with you all to myself. We can spend the day in bed.” She glanced at the table, waggling an eyebrow suggestively. “Or wherever.”

Ben Solo didn’t need to be told twice.

Rey grinned—but then her smile faltered. “What happened to your calligraphy set?” she asked, pointing. “There’s a pen missing.”

“The kyber pen? I took it down to polish it. It was getting dusty,” he lied uneasily. The truth wouldn’t matter in a few days.

“Oh,” Rey said, seeming to drift in her own hyperspace lane for a moment before reaching up to ruffle his hair. “Museum curator,” she murmured affectionately before he captured her lips in a kiss.

***

The fateful morning arrived with a distinct lack of fanfare. The sun shining beyond the planet below wasn’t any brighter. The computer on the Millennium Falcon wasn’t any less temperamental. The Porgs squawked as loudly as ever.

And yet, Ben felt different—invigorated, as if he’d been gifted with an adrenaline shot’s worth of energy. When Rey was still in bed, he yanked his present out from storage in the spare room. Now that he’d organized all the junk, he suspected she’d never be able to find it (of course, if he’d been paying closer attention, he might have noticed that something was distinctly _missing_ from the spare room).

He dragged the package over to her bedside and then, determining that she could trip over it, pulled it slightly to the left. No, to the right. No, left was better.

While he was in the middle of this spatial puzzle, Rey was coming awake for the day, booting up like a droid—if droids had strings of drool connecting their droid mouths to their droid pillows.

“Hwhat is it?” she mumbled sleepily.

Ben stopped fiddling. “It’s your present,” he said proudly. “Open it.” He nudged it forward with his foot, crouching down beside her.

Rey laughed. “I haven’t even had my caf yet,” she said, but began unwrapping it all the same.

Ben felt the sudden need to make a speech—why hadn’t he prepared a speech?! “Rey, I—” he began awkwardly. “The past two years has been the greatest time of my life. Every single moment with you is worth cherishing. You’ve taught me so many things…” And here he thought he was going to start crying.

Wait, Rey was _actually_ crying.

“Rey, you’re so—” he began and stopped. She wasn’t crying. She was _laughing._

“I’m sorry, I’m no good with words,” he said desperately. He was dying for her to say _some_ thing. Anything.

He looked away.

“Ben,” her soft voice whispered, and he felt her hand on his cheek. “Ben, look at me. I’m not laughing at you. I’m laughing at _me_.”

“At you?” he echoed. “Why would _anyone_ laugh at you?” No one was allowed to laugh at his Rey, not even… his Rey.

He opened his mouth to say so when Rey cut him off preemptively. “Let me show you what I mean,” she said, and she reached under the bed and pulled out a small red package. “Open it.”

Ben tore off the wrapping, his brow furrowed. Inside was a small cylindrical glass vial, full of sparkling blue ink.

“Where in the Maker’s name did you find this? No, how did you _afford_ this?”

Rey’s voice was wistful. “I sold that droid, Ben. After you cleaned out the spare room, I went in there to inspect it for myself and I realized… I was never going to find those parts. And I thought… I was being selfish, holding onto something that I’ll never use, just because I didn’t want someone else to have a shot at fixing it. That droid deserved a chance to live, even if I didn’t get to be the one to give it life,” she said, and now Ben was quite sure she _was_ crying. He reached out to swipe away at her tears, his thumb trailing down her cheekbone.

“You’re not selfish, Rey,” he said quietly. “It’s not selfish to want to have something to yourself.”

She was still sniffling a little, but the tears had stopped. “Now—where’s your pen?” she asked, looking around. “It’s lucky you decided to polish it, because now you can finally use it.” She was beaming at him with a radiance Ben hated to dim.

“I sold the pen to a collector on Feva—probably the same one you bought the ink from,” he grumbled. “And then I used the credits to buy your present.” Rey’s hands came up to cover her mouth. At first, he thought she was horrified, but then a giggle crept out.

“We really are a pair, aren’t we?” she said.

He snorted. “We sure are. In fact,” he added, clambering into bed next to her, “if there’s anyone who’s capable of building a droid from the ground up with only a photoreceptor and a gyroscope, it’s you.”

Rey was grinning. “And who says we need some special pen anyway? I’m pretty sure we’ve got twenty Force-sensitive digits between us,” she said, holding up her fingers and twinkling them in the air.

In the end, they managed to put the ink to good use. After all, no canvas in the galaxy could ever replace the feeling of Rey’s skin beneath his fingers.

**Author's Note:**

> [Map of the Millennium Falcon](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/starwars/images/1/1a/MillenniumFalconSchematic-OWM.png/revision/latest?cb=20190613142428)   
>  [QT-9 droid](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/QT-9)   
>  [Happy-patties](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Happy-patty)   
>  [Uneti tree](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Uneti_tree)
> 
> **Edit:** I don't expect to be on it all that often, but I now have a [Twitter](https://twitter.com/typatias)!


End file.
